The most expensive swear of Samuel L Jackson’s career: “Cost them a bunch”
Samuel L Jackson’s filmography does little to suggest he is a man with any kind of pretensions about making “art” every time he steps in front of a camera. Sure, if he’s cast in an important drama about a vital topic, he’ll turn in a captivating performance that will remind people yet again that he’s a great actor. Equally, though, if he reads in the trades that a director he’s previously worked with is making a movie with a hilarious title, he’ll want in, script be damned. Then, he’ll fight for that dumb movie’s right to be dumb all the way through production – before charging the studio a pretty penny to say “motherfucker.”
The story of the most expensive F-bomb in Hollywood history goes back to a fateful day in 2006 when Jackson was perusing Entertainment Weekly. He read a story about his friend Ronny Yu, who directed him in 2001’s The 51st State, making a new movie, and it stopped him dead in his tracks. It was the film’s title that got Jackson’s attention and prompted him to e-mail Yu to check if EW’s reportage was accurate. You see, he had to know if Yu was really making a movie called Snakes on a Plane.
To his delight, Yu told him he was really making that film, which was pitched as a winking B-movie about poisonous snakes being unleashed on unsuspecting passengers on an aeroplane. A-list Academy Award nominee Jackson thought this sounded amazing and exclaimed, “Oh wow, can I be in it?” to which Yu said, “For real?” and Jackson confirmed, “Yeah, for real.”
Hilariously, New Line Cinema didn’t believe Yu when he told them he’d signed Jackson up on the spot, so the studio called his agent. He knew nothing about it, so they called his long-suffering manager, who sighed, “Yeah, he probably said yes.”
True to his word, Jackson signed up for Snakes on a Plane, then spent the next few months battling New Line every time the studio got cold feet about how silly their $33million movie sounded. When it wanted to change the title to Pacific Air Flight 121, Jackson said, “Nuh uh.” As he told an interviewer, “That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.”
Then, when the studio insisted it wanted the movie to be rated PG-13, Jackson cautioned that the internet had already turned the movie into an early version of a meme, and it was obvious what the people wanted. “You could only have one ‘fuck’ or some shit like that in it,” Jackson scoffed to GQ. “And I told them, ‘Look, I gotta say motherfucker in this movie. It’s motherfucking snakes all over this plane.'” New Line fought Jackson on this, though, and he ended up holding his hands up to say, “OK, fine.”
After the movie wrapped, though, New Line quickly ordered five days of reshoots – because Jackson was 100% right. “They test the movie, test the movie, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘You gotta do a reshoot,'” Jackson revealed.
Amusingly, Jackson knew he had the studio over a barrel because coming back for reshoots wasn’t part of his original contract. If it wanted him to return to do the very thing he always insisted should have been part of the movie, it wouldn’t be cheap. “Cost them a bunch of money to get that ‘motherfucker,'” a victorious Jackson grinned.
